Super Bock Holds Up Well

Given the amount of money that the Portuguese leg of Rock In Rio took out of the market, the 18th edition of Super Bock Super Rock was happy to attract an average crowd of 22,000 per day to its beach site at Maco.

That’s down on the record-breaking 35,000-capacity sellout it enjoyed last year, when Arcade Fire topped the bill, and also 2010 – is first year on the new site – when the average crowd was 26,000 per day.

However, compared with the lean years when it was continually moving from site to site, the Musica No Coracao-produced event is still doing much better at Maco.

Up until 2008, Super Bock Super Rock, a twinned event staged in Lisbon and Porto, had been on a low. That year it did only about 13,000 per day at each site and Portuguese daily Público called it “the festival that didn’t exist.”